by Greg Rucka
The Jeep popped and slid along the ruts in the road. At the end of the drive there was a clearing, with a rusted hulk of a tractor and a stack of empty and perforated oil drums vaguely framing the front of the shack. I pulled in and parked and waited a few moments, and there was no motion from the door, no signs of movement beyond the two scum-stained windows.
I didn’t see the Ford anywhere in my mirrors.
There was an odor in the air as I stepped out of the Jeep, foul and heavy and eliminating the scent of the mint all around, and I could see wisps of smoke rising from behind the house, farther in the trees. The only sound came from the Jeep as I shut my door, and then that died away, and there was nothing else.
I took a breath to steel myself, nearly gagged on the stink in the air, and started for the shack. It was bright and the sun was almost directly above me, but it wasn’t doing much to warm me. When a blackbird bolted off a branch in one of the nearby pines, I nearly shrieked, expecting three dozen more to come and suddenly swarm on me. Shades of a Hitchcock movie—cold and still and menacing.
The door was wooden and loose on its hinges, and a red and white plastic sign ordered me to keep out, and another hung below it, warning me not to trespass. I knocked tentatively on the door, anyway.
The door swung open at my touch, then stopped inches into its swing. Through the parting I could see a corner of the shack opposite me, a metal bed frame with a sloppily dressed mattress. Shelves hung to the walls, with books and magazines.
I thought about calling out their names, or maybe identifying myself. Then I thought that I wasn’t keeping out, that I was probably trespassing, and that maybe advertising that fact wasn’t the smartest move I could make.
The door didn’t budge when I gave it a little push, so I pushed it harder. This time it gave an inch, then seemed to push back, so I pushed it a last time and, before it tried to return, slid through the gap and let it fall shut behind me. The change in light was more dramatic than I’d anticipated, and it left me blind for several seconds, blinking away the autumn glare, trying to adjust to the dimness inside.
When my vision returned, the first thing I focused on was the light source, a computer monitor glowing on a workbench. It was a big screen, maybe nineteen inches, and running a screen saver, a parade of naked women, none of them obviously me. The PC was next to it, on the table, and flanking the other side of the monitor was a flatbed scanner. A set of cables ran from the back of the PC to the side of the table, unattached, waiting for attention.
Behind the monitor, on the wall of the shack, were clippings and papers. Most of them I couldn’t make out, but there was a picture of Tailhook that I recognized, torn from some magazine. One of the publicity stills from the press kit that went out when Nothing for Free was released, the same one I had in boxes in my basement closet. Beside it was a printout, what looked like a copy of the tour schedule. Tacked to the wall, made out of nylon or maybe cloth, was a small red flag. A black swastika rode high in the center, and beneath it two stylized lightning bolts, in silver.
And there was a copy of Picture Three.
I took a step forward to get a closer look, and nearly tripped, and that’s when I discovered why the door wouldn’t open properly.
The body was on its side, facing the front of the shack, its legs crossed but extended, as if trying to run to the grave. Both hands were extended in the same direction, as if trying to clear the path. When the door had swung in, it had been blocked by the leg. A black puddle had spread out from the middle of the back, down to the boards that served as a floor, filling the seams between each plank. Flies buzzed over the puddle, sluggish and a little bored.
It wasn’t Tommy, and it wasn’t Mikel, but for that first awful instant it was both of them. Then I was certain it was Tommy, and I was sure it was my fault, I’d screwed up again, and I lurched forward and went to my knees, not thinking and not caring. My gorge rose, and it was the only thing that was keeping my voice from rising, too.
This man’s head was shaven, his forearms tattooed, his face too young; he wasn’t Tommy. There was enough in his death that I could remember him from life, could see him running away from me, down my street in the middle of the night. From fourteen years’ distance, I could see Chris Quick, and he had died with the same fear on his face he’d worn when his father had caught him trying to rape me.
I’d come down in the puddle, felt the blood soaking through my jeans, and it wasn’t Tommy and it wasn’t Mikel, but maybe it was my mother, and I could smell the grass and the beer and the gutted pumpkins and the cigarettes and the truck. I could see my father, his look of horror; I could see Mikel, his look of despair.
The door knocked me as it was shoved open, pushing me and the body aside, and I toppled dumbly, wincing into the sunlight. Flooded with backlight, there was a new man in the doorway, and at first I thought he was wearing a parka, but there was no hood, only long hair flopping loose onto the shoulders of his jacket, and the sunlight licking around his legs showing a camouflage pattern, and his boots were black and high.
It was the same man who’d been in my bedroom the night I’d returned home.
I realized that at the same moment I realized he was holding a rifle in both hands, and that the rifle was pointed at me.
“Fucking cunt,” Brian Quick told me, and he brought the gun up to his shoulder.
CHAPTER 33
I could smell the pine and the mint in the air, crisp and clean odors suddenly revealed beneath the stench of blood and the chemicals brewing behind the shack. I could hear the sound of traffic on the Coburg Road out of Eugene, even though that had to be over a mile away.
I could see this man, maybe four years older than me, barely older than Mikel, the mass of metal in his hands, solid and unforgiving, pointed at me.
This isn’t real, I thought. This cannot be real, this is another memory I’ve manufactured, another fiction created, but this cannot actually be happening to me. I am a musician, I play guitar in a band, I drink and I pass out and feel sorry for what a fucking good life I have.
I do not have guns pointed at me, I am not a detective, I am not a cop, I am not supposed to be here.
And the rifle was now at his shoulder and his mouth was opening to say something else, but the words I heard didn’t come from him, they came from farther away, louder than before.
“Drop that weapon! Drop that weapon fucking now or I drop you! Drop it!”
“Mim! Mim, stay down!”
Brian Quick balked, staring at me on my knees in his brother’s blood.
“Drop it NOW!” Marcus screamed.
The rifle came down, hit the floor without a clatter, like a brick.
“Back it up! Back it up, hands high!”
Brian was looking at me, I could feel it, but with the sunlight behind him, I couldn’t make out his face, see if there was fear or excitement or anger in it. His hands had come down to drop the rifle, and he’d begun to step back, and Marcus was still yelling at him to reverse out of the shack, to do it slowly, to raise his hands. Brian started to follow the last order, but his right rose slower than his left, crossing inside his body as it came up instead of moving straight, and I gave it full-throat, everything I’d ever used onstage, everything Steven had ever taught me about using my diaphragm, and then some.
“Gun, he’s got another gun!” I screamed, pulling myself out of the doorway, tumbling over Christopher Quick’s corpse, and there was a shot that seemed so loud I figured the shack would fall down around me from the percussion.
To my side, behind where I’d knelt, a circle opened in the wooden wall, spitting splinters and showing green leaves beyond.
There were more shots, two or four or three, I couldn’t count them they came so fast, and they didn’t come from the same places. New circles opened in the wood around me and I cowered against the dead man, hiding my head and trying to breathe and not get killed. More shots came, but from a different direction, answered from the opposite, maybe beh
ind me, now, but I didn’t move, I didn’t think I could.
It got quiet again. It stayed quiet.
I didn’t move. My blood-soaked jeans were making me cold, my bruised side ached, but I didn’t move.
I kept seeing Mikel and Tommy and my mother and the truck.
“Mim? Mim, where are you?”
I forced my arms apart, unwrapping my head. Hoffman was in the doorway, her gun in her hands, pointed at the ground. She saw the movement, focused on me.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said, like she’d been kicked and hadn’t seen it coming.
I was starting to push myself up but she took a step forward, pushing me back down with one hand, putting her gun away with the other, shouting for her partner.
“Marcus, ambulance! We need an ambulance! Jesus, don’t move, Mim. Goddamn you, where’re you hit? Where’d you get hit?”
I kept pushing her hands away, and she kept batting them aside and trying again, and I flailed, finally managing my voice again. “Not! I didn’t! Not me!”
She caught it at last, stopped, grabbed my wrists.
“Not me,” I said. “Him, it’s his blood. His blood. I didn’t get hit.”
Hoffman looked at me like this was another of my lies, too, like she couldn’t believe I was this stubborn. I shook my head and indicated Chris’s body, and she didn’t let go of my wrists, just used them to pull me to my feet as she got to hers.
Marcus filled the doorway, breathless. “Sheriff’s on his way, and an ambo . . .”
Hoffman propelled me toward him, releasing her grip. “Cancel the ambo, add a coroner.”
I stepped out, into the hot daylight again, Marcus guiding me by the shoulder. There was already the sound of a siren in the distance, maybe more than one. When I looked down at myself, I saw that the front of my jeans was soaked, and the bottom of my shirt.
Marcus led me back to the Ford, using his free hand to dial his mobile phone. When the call connected he spoke in fluent cop, using numbers and words like “homicide” and “medical examiner” and “fugitive” before he was through. Once we reached the car, he opened the rear door and had me sit on the backseat.
“Sure as hell looks like you got hit.”
“Not me,” I said, and pointed back to the shack. “Chris Quick.”
“That makes the one who was shooting at us brother Brian?”
I nodded. “They did the cameras, you can tell, you just look in there you can tell they did the cameras on me. And they were at my house, it was Brian the first time, the one who put me in the truck, he must have a truck around here, a Ford truck. The first time, not the second time, the second time it was Chris. I should have recognized them, I should have known, but they looked different. It was them.”
“You think Brian’s got your father?”
I started to nod again, then heard the word “fugitive,” just the way Marcus had said it on the phone, and I stopped myself before my chin came down, twisted my face so I wouldn’t have to look him in the eyes.
“Brian got away?”
“He won’t get far. You think he’s got your dad?”
I swallowed, hard, mostly to put my stomach back where it belonged. “I don’t know where Tommy is.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“I know.”
“You are fucking unbelievable—” he said, but then stopped, because the sirens had arrived. “Don’t move, Miss Bracca. Stay right here.”
I nodded, and the sirens cut off, and he went to speak to the new arrivals. I heard the frustration in his voice, could tell it was with me, and reaching its end.
But Brian had escaped, and unless Tommy was nearby, the cops weren’t going to find him, either. Which meant that the only hope in hell I had of getting Tommy back alive was to stick to the original deal, and to pray that Brian meant to do the same thing.
Beyond the Ford, descending on the shack, were deputies in khaki, gesturing to one another, talking earnestly to Hoffman and Marcus. They gestured to me, to my Jeep, to me again. They gestured to the shack. A couple of deputies ran off into the woods. They seemed very busy.
Fugitive. The word resonated, sounded true. Brian had to keep our deal, he had nothing left, I realized. He was wanted now, known now. He could run poor, or he could run rich, and with a million dollars, he’d get a lot farther. He had to keep our deal.
And I needed him to, more than ever before.
Because I’d been wrong.
Tommy hadn’t killed my mother.
CHAPTER 34
A deputy drove me in the back of his car into Eugene, to the sheriff’s station near city hall. When I asked about my car, he told me it was part of a crime scene, and that it would be towed into town as soon as they were done with it. I didn’t ask what that meant. At the station, he escorted me inside, and another deputy met us, this one female. She swabbed my hands, the same GSR test I was becoming way too familiar with, and I couldn’t read her reaction when she saw the results. When that was over, the first deputy left, and the second one took my statement.
She asked why I’d gone to see Christopher and Brian Quick, and I gave her the story I’d given Anne, that I was trying to track down my old foster family, to pay them back for the kindness they’d done me.
The deputy recorded it without editorializing, and if she didn’t believe me, she didn’t act like she cared either way. When we were finished, she told me to get comfortable, that there’d be more people who wanted to talk to me. I asked her if I could get cleaned up first, and she told me that would have to wait.
“Can we keep this out of the papers?” I asked. “I mean, my part?”
“Your part?”
“I’m kind of well-known.”
“Yeah, you kind of are. We’ll see.”
She went out, leaving me in the interview room by myself.
Nobody came to talk to me for another two hours, by which time I had just about gone crazy with the waiting. I’d started pacing the room, but that had very little entertainment value, and I was quickly exhausted. I sat at the table again, drumming my fingers, tapping my toes, and fighting the nagging that had begun in the car as I’d rode in from Junction City.
You fucking cunt.
You’ve sure grown up.
I don’t have perfect pitch, but I have a brilliant memory for sound. I can pick up a melody fast, normally after only hearing it once if it’s simple, two or three times if it’s complex. It doesn’t work for words, it doesn’t work for speech, but for tone, for melody, for notes, I trust it.
Trying to conjure Brian’s voice again, trying to see if it matched the one in my head, playing the two lines against one another, and they weren’t fitting. I imagined Brian’s curse spoken in a house, muffled behind a mask, softer, and all I got was that the octave was similar, if not the same, but that was it.
Which made me very nervous. Because it meant that Brian had someone else, someone besides his brother, that he was working with.
I’d begun to believe they’d forgotten about me when the door opened and Hoffman came in with a short Latino man, about her age, wearing a suit. He had a clipped mustache, and a thick neck, and the thickness seemed to run throughout him, along the shoulders and even down his arms to his hands. He had a stack of papers, and he pulled a chair and sat down, and Hoffman took another, on the end of the table, so she was almost between us.
“Miss Bracca, I’m Detective Munez. Thanks for your patience.”
“Have you found him?”
Munez shook his head. “We will.”
“You don’t think he’s going to go back to his place?”
“Not unless he’s exceptionally stupid. Right now Brian Quick is the prime suspect in the murder of his brother, and he’s wanted for the mass of charges he brought down upon himself when he opened fire on Detective Hoffman here and her partner. But it could happen. A lot of criminals are exceptionally stupid. This one seems a little brighter than most. Or at least more computer literate.”
“I saw the computer.”
He pressed his mustache down, as if it was in danger of coming loose. “It’ll go to the State lab, they’ll check the contents.”
“The Quicks were the ones spying on me,” I said. “They were the ones selling the pictures of me.”
“It’ll go to the State, like I said. They’ll let us know for certain. Could you tell me why you’d gone out to see those two?”
“I told the deputy already.”
“Yeah, I got that, but I’d like to hear it from you. Sometimes things get lost in these statements.”
I put on my helpful face, and told him pretty much the same thing I’d told the deputy.
“You were bringing those two money?”
“Not cash,” I said, as if the suggestion was ludicrous. “I was going to offer to help them out. I didn’t know what they were up to at all, I mean, if I had known they were the ones spying on me, I’d have called you guys or Detective Hoffman or someone. I just . . . I just thought they’d had a run of bad luck, you know? When I talked to their mother she didn’t say what they’d done, just that they’d been down on their luck.”
“Were they blackmailing you? About the pictures?”
“No, honest to God,” I said. “Or if they were planning to, they hadn’t started yet. They’d just been selling the pictures, I think. The only reason I came to see them was that I’d talked to Anne—their mother—earlier today. I found out that their father’s got Alzheimer’s. It’s been really hard on the family, I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help out.”
“Detective Hoffman here tells me that she advised you that both of the Quicks had a record, and that they were considered potentially dangerous individuals.”
“She did, yeah, but . . . they were my foster brothers. I never thought they’d be like . . . that, you know? And when I saw Chris’s body . . .”